Reviews – Dead Harvest, The Wrong Goodbye, The Big Reap

Eeee. It was only last week that Chris F. Holm said he’d send me these bookmarks, and yet here they already. In honour of that, I shall post my reviews of his Collector series here!

Dead Harvest, Chris F. Holm

Mmm, this was awesome. I love the cover, for a start — I love that everything about it announces that it’s a pastiche/homage/[whatever word is right] of noir crime fiction like that of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The title makes that completely obvious (Dead Harvest = Red Harvest, if you didn’t get that), as does the name of the main character (Sam as in Sam Spade, Thornton as in Raymond Chandler’s middle name), and I think the style works too. I think a lot of that is lost on some readers, but for me it just added to the genius of the whole thing.

There’s never going to be anyone that can do Chandler as well as Chandler, but Sam makes a decent shop-worn Galahad on his own account. I’m intrigued by the world, and interested to see more of the angels — the demons don’t seem that unusual, apart from Veloch, but the angels… I’m thinking of Supernatural, and Good Omens. After all, “angels aren’t always the good guys” is a plot both SPN and Good Omens have done, and “trying to kickstart the apocalypse” is Good Omens, and then the involvement of Lilith and…

Anyway, I’m interested to see how it develops. It took me a while to get into the swing of how much gore there’d be, but I found it pretty compulsive reading. I’m really glad I’ve got The Wrong Goodbye around to read, and an ARC of The Big Reap. Gotta love Angry Robot — this is definitely a winning series for me. Tremendous fun.

Yup, I’m in book-love. From the covers to the content, I think Chris F. Holm is doing this series just right, and I am seriously excited that I have the ARC of The Big Reap primed and ready to go on my Kobo. I think if you’re a devotee of Hammett and Chandler and the like, not much is gonna get by you in terms of the plotting, but that’s okay, I’m just soaking up the ambience.

Looking forward to more of Lilith, and hoping so much we see more of Gio and Theresa. I think that was maybe my favourite thing about this book, among a whole host of favourite things: a dude author getting a trans* person’s pronouns consistently right, and treating her no different to any other love interest that might come along. And hey, she kicks ass too. And by the way, she’s blind.

Which is not to say this book is perfect, which is a pretty big thing to ask of any book, but it’s a lot of fun and tickles me just right.

I’m so happy I got the ARC of this from Netgalley. So happy! There were aspects I didn’t like much at first that actually, yeah, I really started liking them as things developed. I loved that we got to see characters from the previous two books (however briefly), and that the whole Lilith plot thread developed further (and developed the way it did). I was so prepared to love this series based on the fact that it was a pastiche of Chandler et al alone, but now I love it for its own merit, too.

Things that stand out to me as I try to write this: the smart tie-ins with history, the philosopical side of it, the fact that Sam has to do some moral squaring away at the end, Lilith, the Twilight reference.

Some stuff that felt less awesome: the target of Sam’s first Collection, some predictable notes of the plot that just felt too easy or too obvious, the fact that I have no more of this series to read.